Catering and Dividend Policy: Evidence from the Netherlands Over the Twentieth Century

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Queen's University Research Portal Catering and Dividend Policy: Evidence from the Netherlands over the Twentieth Century de Jong, A., Fliers, P. T., & van Beusichem, H. C. (Accepted/In press). Catering and Dividend Policy: Evidence from the Netherlands over the Twentieth Century. Financial History Review. Published in: Financial History Review Document Version: Peer reviewed version Queen's University Belfast - Research Portal: Link to publication record in Queen's University Belfast Research Portal Publisher rights Copyright 2019 Cambridge University Press. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Queen's University Belfast Research Portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The Research Portal is Queen's institutional repository that provides access to Queen's research output. Every effort has been made to ensure that content in the Research Portal does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable UK laws. If you discover content in the Research Portal that you believe breaches copyright or violates any law, please contact [email protected]. Download date:10. Sep. 2019 Catering and Dividend Policy: Evidence from the Netherlands over the Twentieth Century ABE DE JONG*, PHILIP FLIERS# AND HENRY VAN BEUSICHEM† August 2019 Forthcoming in Financial History Review * Corresponding author. Monash University, Australia and Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, The Netherlands, email: [email protected]. # Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, email [email protected]. † Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences, University of Twente, The Netherlands, email: [email protected]. The data for this project was collected as part of the NWO project ‘The corporate governance of Dutch business in the 20th century – structural change and performance’ (NWO 360-52-080). Authors are listed alphabetically. We thank Gareth Campbell, Chris Colvin, Marc Deloof, Oscar Gelderblom, Les Hannah, Joost Jonker, Petko Kalev, Leentje Moorgat, Kim Oosterlinck, Neil Rollings, John Turner, Jan Luiten Van Zanden, Chris Veld and Gerarda Westerhuis, two anonymous reviewers, and participants of the Financial History Group in Utrecht, the European Business History Association Annual Congress 2015, the Belgian Financial Research Forum 2014, and the European Association for Banking and Financial History New Scholars Workshop 2014 for comments. 1 Catering and Dividend Policy: Evidence from the Netherlands over the Twentieth Century Abstract This paper investigates the determinants of Dutch firms’ dividend policies in the 20th century. We identify three distinct episodes and document shifts in dividend policies in the 1930s and 1980s, because firm managers cater to the changing preferences of shareholders. The first episode, prior to the Second World War, was characterized by dividends that were fixed contracts between shareholder and management and the payouts were mechanically determined by earnings. The second epoch of Dutch dividend policy, until the 1980s, was characterized by dividend smoothing. Dividends were still strongly related to earnings, but because of shareholder’s preferences for stable dividend income, earnings changes are incorporated in dividends with a lag. Finally, dividend policy in the most recent episode is inspired by shareholder wealth maximization, based on agency and signalling motives. In this period, dividends have become largely decoupled from earnings. 2 1. Introduction After the seminal works of Modigliani and Miller (1958, 1961) and Black (1976), the most commonly cited arguments in favour of firm’s paying dividends are the reduction in agency costs (Easterbrook 1984; and Jensen 1986) and the value of signalling (Bhattacharya 1979; and John and Williams 1985; Miller and Rock, 1985). For recent years, Fama and French (2001) show that the proportion of firms paying cash dividends has sharply declined. Moreover, Brav et al. (2005) show that recently US firms exhibited significant decoupling between earnings and dividends. Recently, the changing preferences of shareholders have been incorporated in the literature by Baker and Wurgler (2004a, 2004b), who show that firms’ dividend policies during the period 1963-2000 catered towards shareholders’ appetite, based on relative market valuations of (non-) dividend-paying stocks. Dividend policy has also been studied in an historical context. Dividend policy for British firms has been studied by Turner et al. (2013) over the period 1825-1870, while Braggion and Moore (2011) investigate British firms, over the period 1895-1905. Long-run evidence on dividend policies of Belgian firms over 1838- 2012 has been provided by Moortgat et al. (2017). This study investigates determinants of dividend policies for Dutch companies. We ask two questions. First, how did dividend policies evolve in The Netherlands over the course of the 20th century? Second, how did the purpose of Dutch dividend policies change in this evolution? We describe the history of Dutch corporate finance and governance and examine the role of shareholder preferences in firm’s payout policies. We identify three distinct regimes of dividend policies in Dutch economic history and estimate models for each regime to assess the determinants of dividend policy and value effects of dividends. We apply data on Dutch non-financial corporations listed on the stock exchange of Amsterdam from 1903 to 2003. Studying Dutch dividend policy over an extended period is interesting for a variety of reasons. First, the Dutch economy is a small and open economy and a price taker on global markets, as such dividend policies should resonate with international practices. Second, the quality and the availability of the data is good. While Turner et al. (2013) and Braggion and Moore (2011) study respectively fifty and ten years, we study a period covering one hundred years. Moortgat et al. (2007) cover a period of 174 years, but their analysis is primarily based on stock market data and does not use accounting data. The main contribution of our paper is to relate catering theory to the understanding of long-run dividend policy evolution. Baker and Wurgler (2004a, 2004b) document that firms adjust their dividend payouts to short-term changes in the relative valuation of firms that do 3 and do not pay dividends. In addition to this short-term catering practice, we document a more fundamental way of catering where firms adapt to long-term changes in shareholders’ preferences about the dividend policies. We show that over time there is substantial time variation in dividend policies, which is consistent with managers of large firms who cater towards shifts in shareholder preferences. The remainder of this study is structured in the following manner. First, in Section 2, we describe the institutional background of the Dutch corporate sector in order to document the three distinct dividend policy regimes and we define predictions for each of the three regimes. Section 3 introduces the data set and methods. In section 4 we describe our empirical analyses of the determinants of dividends of the payout ratio, as well as the value-implications of dividend policy. Section 5 concludes. 2. Dividend regimes 2.1 Early 20th century: Distributing profits according to statutes Characterized by a tradition of international trade and foreign investment, the Netherlands’ small, open economy experienced a long period of economic growth and international interconnectedness that lasted until 1914 (Sluyterman 2005). Neutrality during the First World War posed both challenges and opportunities for Dutch firms, but the economy largely benefited and grew strongly after 1918 (Van Zanden 1998). Although some larger multinational firms were located in the Netherlands, the majority of public firms were relatively small, with dominantly family ownership and private investors (Westerhuis and De Jong, 2015). Notwithstanding a revision in 1928, the law governing financial reporting incorporated in the Commercial Code remained underdeveloped until enactment of the Company Law in 1976. Prior to the Second World War, firms seldom disclosed more financial information than was required by law, and also held undisclosed reserves (Zeff et al. 1992). The main purpose of dividends in the early 20th century was twofold. First, dividends were a source of income for the shareholders. Many families and private investors would use the dividends for consumption and the remainder for reinvestment in other assets. Second, due to weak disclosure practices, dividends provided the most tangible evidence of the firms’ performance. The practice of determining the annual dividend also reflects this dual purpose, as the dividend policy was predetermined in the company statutes, contracting the management to distribute cash to the owners (Koert 1934). A typical statutory arrangement would distribute 4 profits between reserves, to which an amount sufficient to meet a specified level would be allocated, and fixed payments, expressed as a percentage of their nominal equity value, made to shareholders (and directors). These practices

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